


i won't be silent and i won't let go

by MaddieandChimney



Series: Soulmate AU's [1]
Category: 9-1-1 (TV)
Genre: F/M, Soulmate AU, mentions of abuse, mentions of domestic violence, mentions of injury
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-06
Updated: 2021-01-10
Packaged: 2021-03-17 13:28:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 6,065
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28600689
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MaddieandChimney/pseuds/MaddieandChimney
Summary: Damage done to a person also translates into their soulmates body.
Relationships: Evan "Buck" Buckley & Maddie Buckley, Maddie Buckley/Howie "Chimney" Han
Series: Soulmate AU's [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2095764
Comments: 30
Kudos: 65
Collections: 9-1-1 Tales





	1. Chapter 1

The first time it happens, she’s five-years-old and she’s reading a book when a sudden pain rushes through her, pulsating in her arm causing her to drop the book she was holding as she lets out a scream. It takes fifteen minutes for her parents to calm her down, until her mother’s hand is pressing gently against her cheek and promising her that the pain will stop soon, that it’s only temporary. No one explains to her what it means, not yet, but her dad is smiling affectionately, and her mom lifts her into her lap and sings her a song as she rubs her back until the pain in her arm stops a few hours later.

The fast-healing bruises she gets every so often are easy to forget about, especially when her parents shrug them off each time. They must be normal, she supposes, at least until she’s eleven and keeling over in the middle of Math class because of a horrific pain in her stomach. There’s blood pouring down her face and even when the pain stops, there’s a panic inside of her whilst her teacher gently leads her from the classroom and promises her everything is going to be okay. Maddie doesn’t hear the word ‘soulmate’ until her dad is carrying her to his car as she cries, explaining to her that when he was just her age, her mom had fallen out of a tree and broken both her legs and he had been in the middle of a soccer game at the time.

It doesn’t make sense to her because she knows her mom grew up in Florida and her dad grew up in New York, they hadn’t even laid eyes on each other until they were eighteen and in college. They had told the story more than enough times to both her and her little brother, she had it memorised, hoping that one day she’d get lucky enough to meet someone who loved her just as much as her dad loved her mom.

When they get home, her mom is waiting for her with open arms, holding her tightly and closely as they carefully explain what a soulmate is and what it means for her. It barely makes sense to her, and her first thought and question is why isn’t _her_ soulmate more careful with their bodies if they know they’re going to be hurting the person they’re meant to love. It’s hard to understand that some things are out of their control.

Maddie is so very careful after that and maybe the person who is meant to be out there for her is, too. It’s just a shame she’s not too careful with the information though, because a few glasses of wine when she’s nineteen and she’s asking the handsome man who is five years older than her, as he stands across from her, if he broke his arm when he was ten, not noticing how he falters before he nods his head. Her mind isn’t clear when, a few weeks later, she’s asking him what happened when he was sixteen because her head been bleeding and her stomach had ached. It never occurred to her to not _give_ him all the information he needed so he can make up a story to match.

It takes her five years to realise he’s not her soulmate at all but by then it’s too late. They’re married and she loves him and maybe the entire thing doesn’t really matter anyway. Just because it worked for her parents and a lot of her friends, it doesn’t mean it’s the be all and end all, right? Most of her friends snub every single gorgeous man or woman that approaches them if they don’t meet a particular injury history and maybe it’s best not to get caught up in all of that. Maybe she’s just following her heart instead of her soul, and that’s not a bad thing. Not a bad thing at all.

.

Howie’s mom tells him when he’s barely old enough to understand that there is someone out there who he is meant to be with. A piece of his soul out there that will so perfectly fit with his own. He can see the sadness in her eyes when she explains, and he won’t understand until he’s fourteen and his mom explains to him that her soulmate had passed away barely a year after she had met her. And he hadn’t realised how cruel the world had been to the woman he loved so much until she was faced with death, too. He takes solace in the fact she was smiling when she took her last breath, hopeful that she would see the woman her soul was tied with again, sad only because she was leaving another part of her soul behind.

His first sign is when he’s nine-years-old and he gets a graze on his knee, that disappears a few hours later. He smiles as he shows his mom proudly, only to get shoved by his dad a few minutes later for playing into his mother’s fantasies, as he always says. He apologises in his head to his unknown person when he’s added to her grazed knee with a bruised shoulder and makes sure never to mention the world ‘soulmate’ around his dad ever again.

Howie is as careful as he can be, not wanting to cause the girl or boy out there any pain if he can absolutely avoid it. But when he’s twelve, he tries to stop his dad from leaving and his prize is getting his arm slammed in the door, hearing the snap and feeling the intense pain that rushes through his body before he sobs for the person he had unintentionally hurt. He gets a few bruises here and there, grazes on his knees mostly and he wonders if she or he is into sports and what they do and what they like, making up scenarios in his head about the person waiting for him.

He hates himself when he’s in his first (and only) fight when he’s eighteen and whilst he’s curled up on the ground feeling feet kicking into his stomach until his head is slammed into the concrete ground, he knows he should be thinking about himself but he’s more terrified for the person who is unknowingly connected to him.

Whoever the person is, they’re vigilant and he finds himself looking for them everywhere. He’s all but given up by the time he’s twenty-eight and standing in his LAFD uniform, silently promising whoever is out there waiting for him that he’s found his calling and he will do everything in his power to make sure he doesn’t do too much damage to their bodies but all he wants to do is help as many people as he can. And he can’t ignore that, can he? He’d been playing it safe for too long and putting a person he hadn’t even met yet first but maybe it was time to start living and stop waiting.

He finds himself mostly grateful when Kevin dies that this damage his soulmate can feel is purely a physical sense. His emotional pain is nothing like he could ever describe, it’s crushing, he feels as though he can’t go on most of the time, even though he knows he has to. But it hurts to know that Kevin never got to meet his soulmate and she or he would never know what an amazing person they would have fallen in love with. The guilt is there, it’s always there, lingering on as he promises to live enough for the both of them, even if it doesn’t feel right and it doesn’t feel fair. And it also makes him wonder if he’s ever going to get a chance to meet the person he’s meant to be with as he watches everyone else fall in love around him.

He doesn’t ‘hear’ from her for a while, apart from the odd bruise that reminds him that she’s still out there somewhere. And then when he’s thirty-one, he wakes up in the middle of the night, screaming in pain in the middle of the bunk room at the station because it feels as though his entire body is on fire. He can feel his ribs breaking, and then his wrist, his face is bruised and bleeding and when the pain eventually subsides a few hours later, he locks himself away in the bathroom to cry for whatever the hell his soulmate had gone through that day.

Howie lets his thoughts get carried away, making up a hundred different scenarios, each one causing his heart to ache even more. She’d been mugged, attacked, she’d fallen down the stairs, there was a car accident. It’s a mixture of relief and fear when three days later, a new bruise appears and he knows she or he is alive but they’ve been hurt again, causing an all too uncomfortable feeling to rise within him that he tries to pass off as his own anxiety until it happens again, a week later. And then again a few weeks after that and he doesn’t know what else to think other than someone is hurting _his_ person on purpose and in turn, hurting him.

Another year passes, and then another – the bruising and the cuts and the broken bones continue, making note of each one in his head as he promises himself if he ever gets the opportunity to make this person happy, he will make sure that they feel nothing but complete and utter love at his hands. He still struggles in the knowledge that they would stay with someone they know isn’t their soulmate, but maybe they’ve given up, too. He’s thirty-eight and dating women and men who are using him as a go-between until they meet the person they’re meant to be with and it fills a hole for a short while until it doesn’t and his heart breaks a little more every single time.

He’s in the middle of dinner at his best friends house when the first blow hits him and it’s not the first time and he knows it probably won’t be the last but it’s happening more and more often and as much as it causes him physical pain every single time, it’s nothing compared to the ache that stays in his heart for so long afterwards. The sound of his fork hitting the plate in front of him is enough to pull Hen from looking over at Karen, immediately noticing the look on his face before she ushers Karen and Denny out of the room and he feels her hand on his back trying to bring him some level of comfort because she can’t do anything else. The wounds will heal a lot quicker for him than they ever will for the person receiving them and it breaks his heart each and every single time.

He’s a paramedic so he lists any injury he has by the time he can catch his breath again and Hen is helping him up from the floor where he’d curled himself up in a ball in an attempt to hide his cries of pain. At least two broken ribs, a broken collarbone, a broken nose, a concussion, a few broken fingers and he’s terrified she has internal bleeding because his stomach is killing him. Usually, it passes in a few hours but he’s still feeling physically and emotionally exhausted nearly twelve hours later, curled up in Hen and Karen’s guest bed, sobbing to himself as he tries to imagine why anyone would want to hurt another person so much.

It’s not until Hen finally leaves to grab a glass of water that he takes the opportunity to dig his nails into his arm as hard as he possibly can, in the hopes that the person who can feel every pain he feels will know that he’s there. The nails digging into his skin until he can feel his own blood coating his skin is the only message he can think of to tell them that he’s there and he’s waiting.

He shouldn’t smile but a few minute later, bleeding fingernail marks mar his other arm in response and he can close his eyes again, knowing that they’re still alive and they know that he’s out there somewhere. It’s not everything, it’s barely anything at all but it’s enough for now just to know that they’re alive and they know he is too.

He’s been waiting thirty-eight years, he’ll wait another thirty-eight if he has to. He just hopes he doesn’t _have_ to.


	2. Chapter 2

Maddie sobs as she hides in the corner of the bathroom, digging her nails into her arm for the second time in the past hour, waiting for something back. The cut on her lip stings as her bottom lip trembles, the tears only falling heavier when her arm is still left unmarred by the crescent shaped marks that have been her one lifeline for the past few years.

There’s no way they survived, she cannot imagine for even a second that the person she was meant to end up with had lived through whatever the hell they had gone through that had caused the kind of pain she had felt barely six hours before. Her heart aches at the thought, digging her nails a little harder into her arm in her third attempt as she sobs. He’s not going to respond because he’s not alive. She’s a nurse, she’s seen it all before but whatever had caused the head injury she had suffered through for a few hours… it seems impossible.

Her head still pounds from the inexplicable pain she had felt searing through her just as she had been grabbing a glass of whiskey for Doug after he’d had a particularly difficult day at work. She can remember the sound of the glass hitting the floor and she couldn’t stop the screams of pain that had fallen from her lips despite her best efforts. There we blood, so much blood pouring from the back of her head and the front and if she hadn’t seen it all before, she’d assume she was dying, too. It took a few hours for it to subside, Doug having left the room so he didn’t have to watch and she had been forced to watch in the mirror as the hole in the middle of her forehead started to fade until it was gone.

Until her soulmate was gone.

They must have shot, that’s all she can think of that would cause that kind of injury. They must have been shot in the head and the chances of survival are next to nothing and—she had been too late. She had settled too soon, she had fallen for someone she never should have, someone who was never meant to be hers. It was too late, now she was thirty-four-years old and she had lost her chance at meeting the person she was connected to.

She sniffs, wiping at the blood that drips down her forehead, from her own injuries that won’t heal anytime soon and thankfully, the one silver lining in all this, her soulmate will never have to feel again. They probably wouldn’t want anything to do with her anyway, not after everything she must have put them through knowingly. She’d been so careful when she was growing up, promising her parents that she would take good care of herself to take good care of her soulmate, too. If only they could see her now, they’d be so ashamed. She had looked them both in the eyes and told them that Doug was the one and they’d believed her because they had no reason not to.

Maddie hadn’t seen them in years, she hadn’t seen her brother in just as long but had stopped answering when any of them called two years ago. It was easier that way, the guilt and the shame too much to carry on her shoulders any longer every single time she thought about how if she had just been a little more patient and a little less caught up in Doug’s eyes and his smile. They’d hate her if they found out she wasn’t taking care of herself and she most definitely wasn’t taking care of her soulmate. It was just too late for her. If she leaves, she dies but then—if her soulmate is dead, does it matter if she joins them?

She hides herself a little further into the corner of the room when she hears Doug knocking, his fists against her face and his screaming at her still too fresh to dare open the door to him despite his begging. Maddie tries again, re-opening the wounds on her arm as she lets the blood drip down onto the bathroom floor, closing her eyes and gently hitting her head against the cool tiles of the wall when nothing comes.

He’s gone.

She just wishes that hadn’t been the catalyst that makes her want to leave.

.

Chimney holds Bobby’s hand tightly in his own when he opens his eyes for the first time. He briefly remembers sitting in the car, rebar through his head, thinking to himself that there was not a chance in hell he would survive this. Forty-one years of life and he would never meet his soulmate. He would have waited forever for even just one day of knowing what true love felt like and now he would never get it.

It comforting to know that he has friends around him, his found family that mean the world to him – Hen and Bobby and Buck… they’re mean everything to him but there’s still a massive piece of the puzzle missing. Hen had met Karen ten years ago, pulling her from a fire, knowing immediately that they were meant to be when the stinging pain on her arm turned out to be the same burn Karen had suffered in the midst of it all. He can still see the light in her eyes all these years later and the smile on her face the second she lays eyes on the other woman and it’s reciprocated in the most beautiful way possible. And Bobby—Bobby got a _second_ chance at finding love. A second soulmate in the midst of the darkness he had found himself in. It was rare but it happened and now he had Athena. Two soulmates and Chimney couldn’t even find his one.

And then there was Buck—he was young, still playing around, moving from woman to woman in an attempt to have as much fun as he could until he found the person he was meant to be with. He’d admitted to having a rough time a few years before, whoever his soulmate was had certainly put their bodies through the ringer for a while there. Chimney never admits to anyone other than Hen about the pain he so often feels. How it seems to be progressing, getting worse each year and whilst he’s got this awful feeling that his person is suffering at the hands of someone else, he knows there are other options. Hen tries to ease the tension a little by nudging his side as they watch Orange is the New Black, telling him that maybe his soulmate is behind bars.

He laughs, and so does she but deep down, he thinks maybe it’s the least sinister of the options that had been going through his head.

Chimney takes a breath as he looks at the people around him, all of whom have told him he’s a miracle more than once and suddenly, all he can do is burst into tears because for however many hours, he had added to the pain of the one person he had only ever wanted to protect. It makes him feel sick, he’d promised them that they would never have to suffer if he could help it and he couldn’t. Or maybe he could have because he shouldn’t have been driving angry and he shouldn’t have let his eyes leave the road for even a second. He should have been taking better care of himself and themselves just like he had always promised his mother he would do.

He yanks his hand from Bobby’s, despite the comfort he feels in that moment and grabs onto his arm, digging his fingers into the skin as hard as he can as he cries. He can just make out in the corner of his eyes, Hen shaking her head when Bobby and Buck try to reach for him to stop him and it’s barely any time at all when similar shaped marks show up on his other arm in front of their very eyes and he cries harder out of relief, out of sadness and—he’s going to be okay. He’s alive. Maybe he’ll still get that one day after all.

.

It’s been a few days until she feels the most beautiful pain she has ever felt in her life. Blood pricks at her skin as she’s seeing to a patient and she finds herself smiling down at the marks, tears of relief falling down her face before she steps away to let whoever is out there know that she got their message. They had survived the impossible, the least she could do was risk everything just to find them, even if it only ends up being for a few hours or a day. Anything at all just to see their face, just to feel a true, loving hand against her skin… it’s worth it. If they can survive a bullet to the head, or whatever the hell they had gone through, maybe she can survive her husband.

It’s not a plan that can be done on impulse, Maddie knows she has to be patient and she has to follow her heart if she’s ever going to get the chance to meet him or her, whoever is waiting for her out there. She doesn’t tell Doug that her soulmate is alive, she just lets him believes that she’s as alone as he is in the world and they have no choice but each other. Him because he never had a soulmate from the beginning and her, because she had waited too long. If she has no one to run to, no one to meet, why would she ever leave?

Maddie says a silent apology with every bruise, every cut, every broken bone and sprain, every bit of pain she feels for the next eight months. The plan having truly hatched on Christmas when she had seen her brothers smiling face on a Christmas card, knowing if she ever wanted to be happy, she had to follow her heart. Even if her soulmate weren’t in LA, her brother was and she would regret it for the rest of her life, however short that may be when her husband finds her, if she didn’t build a bridge with her little brother who had always meant the world to her.

She bites down on her bottom lip that morning when she hears Doug leaving for his five day conference, knowing she has to act quickly to give herself the best chance. There’s no room for error, the plan has been forming for eight months and it’s now or never and Maddie doesn’t want to see what never looks like. Not anymore.

She takes a breath as she climbs into the car, digging her nails into the palm of her hand this time, in the hopes that somehow the change of location will somehow translate over the possibly thousands of miles between them so he knows she’s escaped. She doesn’t know if he’s got the hint, she doesn’t feel a pinch for another ten minutes, on the back of her hand as she’s driving away from the place that had been her home for eleven years. It’s not a sad goodbye, she’s hopeful, focusing on the fast beating of her heart as she refuses to look in her rear-view mirror as tears fall down her face.

She’s out. Maybe they’ll get a chance after all, if she’s even headed in the right direction. Just a day of happiness would make it all worth it, right?


	3. Chapter 3

LA is a breath of fresh air she never knew was possible. She had expected her brother to be angry with her, a part of her had even braced herself for rejection but instead, he had welcomed her with open arms. She hadn’t seen him in so long, she hadn’t spoken to him in three years and yet somehow it felt as though no time had passed at all. He had been in LA for much of the time since they had lost contact - or rather, since she had decided she couldn’t lie to him anymore. And happiness looked good on him, so much better than the last time she had seen him when he was twenty-two and about to go traveling. Maddie can remember how jealous she had felt, realising she had settled for someone she was never meant to be with as she wondered if, if she had traveled after college, she would have met her soulmate. 

Her brother still hasn’t. Although he tells her that he had fallen in love with a woman named Abby who wasn’t his person but she helped him realise that he couldn’t keep going from one person to the other to fill a hole that can’t really be filled. He knew, her little brother knew that she had been lying about Doug being her soulmate, she doesn’t ask him how or when he realised but she knows they’re both hoping that they don’t spend their entire lives searching. The world is a big place and whilst she knows that the universe will always work its magic in its own way, maybe she missed her chance. She only hopes her brother didn’t miss his. 

“What did you do to your arm?” Maddie looks up when she hears his voice, her fingers gently grazing along the burn mark that’s already starting to fade, biting down on her lip as she does. She can’t decipher the look on her brother’s face, his head tilted to the side, his eyes exploring her face before he looks back down at the small mark, angry against her pale skin. 

Her brown eyes follow his, finger tracing along the edge of the burn before she sighs, “Nothing. Maybe they’re a chef.” She smiles at the thought, although the burns don’t happen often, she just likes to imagine the person she is meant to be with out there in the world, happy and unharmed. Even if she never gets the chance to meet them because she had spent sixteen years with a man who was never meant to be hers and eleven years putting their body through so much pain when she could have put an end to it before it had even begun by being more careful with the information she had given out. 

Buck, as he prefers to be called these days, moves over to her to take her arm in his own, as she misinterprets his frown for concern, “Maybe he’s a firefighter.” He finally says, taking a deep breath before he nods his head, “I think you should meet my friend Chimney.” Maddie opens her mouth to protest, she’s only been in LA for a few weeks and had barely left her brother’s apartment in that time, she wasn’t sure she was ready to meet his friends. “Do you trust me, Maddie?” 

Slowly, she nods her head, watching as the burn continues to heal, “Of course I do.” 

Her brother carefully wraps his hand around the mark before he presses a kiss to the top of her head as she looks up at him, scrunching her nose up at the smile on his face before he pulls back. “Come to the station with me tomorrow, I know it’s a lot and I know you’re scared but I think it’ll be worth it. I promise.” 

. 

It’s been a few weeks since he had felt nails digging into his hand and he’s almost too scared to double check if they’re okay. They had found their own way of communicating but the thought of that being a goodbye, which judging by the amount of injuries he or she had suffered through over the years, could very much be the case, was too much for his mind to handle. This way, the not knowing, he still had hope that the change of location in their usual communication was not the goodbye he had feared it to be. 

He’s sitting at the table in the station, laughing and joking with Hen with a mouthful of egg and spinach, when everything changes. Chimney had imagined meeting his soulmate every single day since he had found out. It turns out that his mother had told him the story of how he will be able to feel any physical hurt his soulmate does before his had even been born. It explains why he hadn’t felt anything until he was nine, the memory of staring down at the graze on his knee and knowing it wasn’t his had made him so happy for all of five minutes before his father had tried to tear him down. 

In his head, he had thought it would be instantaneous. That he would see her or him and just… know. He had imagined something romantic, the two of them bumping into each other on a rainy day or hearing a laugh and just knowing it was the laugh he was meant to hear for the rest of his life. The reality was different and slightly more embarrassing with a mouthful of food when he extends his hand to shake hers, not paying any attention to the way Buck has only introduced her to him. He tries not to think about it later, how Buck had been the one to put all the pieces of the puzzle together from little bits of information he had received from Maddie and from him over the years they had spent together. He also tries not to think about how much pain that must cause her brother, knowing that, when Chimney had woken up screaming, it meant his sister had been in unimaginable pain, thousands of miles away. 

“I-I… what happened to your head?” Those are the first words spoken by his soulmate, enough to cause him to almost choke on his food before he gulps it down. People have stared, people have asked before but not quite so… abrupt. He supposes it’s a Buckley trait, trying to bite back the sarcastic comment that wants to fall from his lips before she shakes her head, her cheeks flushing. “I mean… did it happen two hundred and forty five days ago?” Neither of them notice the way Buck gestures for Hen to leave them alone, the two of them alone in the middle of the station as he stares at her and realises that there is only one stranger in the whole world who would know exactly when the accident happened, slowly nodding his head.

Her fingers reach out to gently touch the scar on his forehead and usually it’s something that would make him flinch away but this time, he leans into it. And he’s known her all of a minute but it feels as though he has felt her touch a thousand times before, and in a way, he sort of has. “Hi.” It’s pathetic, and not all what he had wanted to say if he ever got the chance to meet the person he was meant to spend his life with but her laugh really is the one he wants to hear every single day for the rest of his life, the smile on his face wide when her hand drops from his scar and he leans forward only to gently press his forehead against hers. 

“Hi.” She whispers back, eyes glancing down as her fingers move to the burn mark on his arm from the day before and he wonders if that was when Buck had realised and he’s never more thankful to have gotten injured when at work. “I’m so sorry, I’m just…  _ so _ sorry.” The connection he feels to her is everything he had imagined it to be, thumbs brushing at the tears that fall down her face when he pulls back ever so slightly so he can really look at her. She’s beautiful, the most beautiful woman he has ever seen and it’s been forty-two years and every ounce of pain he has ever been through is suddenly more than worth it when he’s looking into her brown eyes and finally feeling as though he’s complete, for the first time in his life. The missing piece of the puzzle is standing right in front of him and he has so much to say to her but somehow can’t find the words as he shakes his head. 

“You’ve nothing to be sorry for.” He finally manages to get out, knowing he might never understand why she would spend so long with someone who she wasn’t meant to spend her life with but also knowing matters of the heart were so much more complicated than he could ever imagine. It just causes an ache in his heart to know that she had suffered so much at the hands of someone she must have loved, from the stories Buck had told the rest of the 118 since Maddie had arrived in LA a few weeks before. He wants to kiss her, he wants to hold her close and never let go but he also knows that the two of them meeting isn’t going to magically heal the trauma from the last few years. 

Instead, his lips move to her forehead and he wraps both of his arms tightly around her whilst hers move around his waist. “I feel like I’ve known you my whole life.” She finally mumbles against his chest, “I thought you would hate me or I had missed my chance, I waited too long.” Tears fall down his own face as he nods, looking over her head to meet Buck’s tear-filled eyes before he takes a breath. He’d loved her without even knowing who she was, it was written in the stars long before either of them were even capable of knowing what being in love truly was. 

“There hasn’t been a single moment of my life that I have hated you.” Both his hands fall to either side of her face when he pulls back to really look into her eyes so she feels the words as well as hears them before she smiles at him and nothing in the world can ever compare to the way his heart feels as though it’s about to fly out of his chest as he grins back at her. “I’m going to spend the rest of our lives together making sure you know that, when you’re ready.” 

Maddie sniffs, nodding her head, “H-how did you--” Her fingers are on his scar again and his heart aches once more at the thought of her having to feel it for even a second. He hadn’t felt the pain at the time but he had felt the sheer terror and to see it happening but not have a clue what was going on? He knew that feeling better than anything else. 

“I’ll grab you a coffee and some breakfast. Sit down, you might not believe me when you hear.” It’s strange, the world seems brighter now, everything seems so much better as she sits down in the seat he had vacated upon meeting her and he makes his way towards the kitchen, squeezing Hen’s arm as he walks past her. There are no words, she knows exactly what this day means to him. She knows everything he has been through and in turn, what Maddie has physically been through and he’ll do anything to make sure she doesn’t have to feel an ounce of pain ever again.

He’d have waited another forty-two years to look into those beautiful brown eyes. He’s just glad he didn’t have to.


End file.
